CSH Peaking 2005

Date published: January 15, 2005

Like many times in the past, the "fraternity house" that I'm an alum of had a Peaking. What is a Peaking? Well it's a watching of the television show Twin Peaks, which aired on US TV in 1990 and 1991. Last night at the house, we watched the pilot episode and episodes 1 through 4. They'll be watching another chunk of the show today, and then maybe another chunk on Sunday. As you can see from the picture above, Log was present.

Anyway, I thought I'd take this time to reflect on the house and how the peaking all came about.

Sometime between January and May of 1997, Computer Science House (CSH) had a two part event called the Lynching. Each part happened on different weekends and featured work by David Lynch. During Lynching Part 2, the first season of Twin Peaks was watched. I wasn't a member of the house yet, but I lived in the dorms just down the hall outside of the house. I heard they would be watching the show, so I wandered by the floor (Computer Science House is a floor in the dormitories at Rochester Institute of Technology. It's not a physical house). The members who were running Lynching Part 2 ended up not having some of the episodes, but I saved the day by running back to my room and getting my copies. I'd been a fan of the show from its original airing on ABC and had VHS tapes that I made from the rebroadcast on the Bravo network. The people running the Lynching were ever so thankful and thus started my friendship with CSH. The next year, I became a member.

For the next year (the 97-98 school year), it was decided to have a Lynching and a Peaking instead of a two part Lynching. Lynching Part 2 was mostly just watching Twin Peaks anyway, and David Lynch wasn't heavily involved with a big chunk of the show, so the Lynching term didn't quite fit. Thus, the Peaking was born.

We went all out for the first Peaking, which took place sometime during the fall of '97. We made some "curtains" (ok, ok, they were made of paper...in later years we got real red fabric), and we had dough nuts, coffee, and pie. That's Bort meticulously arranging the dough nuts in the first photo above. He was also the reader of the Log Lady Intros before each episode. Of course, he had a log to hold. The log came from member Farkas's fake fireplace. Farkas is in the blue shirt in the bottom left of the first photo. He's breaking up "Cooper's dough nut", the one where Cooper only eat's an eighth then leaves.

At the first Peaking, every broadcast episode from the series (including the pilot) and the movie Fire Walk With Me were watched straight through. The Log Lady intros made by Lynch for the Bravo rebroadcast weren't easily available, but the script was, so Bort would read teh intros before each episode. All told, it was about 34 hours straight! Of course it was horribly tiring, but sitting through it all just adds to the whole weird experience!

Also at the first Peaking, I dressed up as the Little Man from Another Place (see second photo above). I snuck out during the second episode, got dressed up as the Little Man, and snuck back into the room where we were having the Peaking. Later in the episode when the Little Man starts dancing in Cooper's dream, my friend Heather flipped on a strobe light we had found and brought in, and I jumped up and started dancing exactly like the Little Man does. I'm a perfectionist so I made Heather practice controlling the speed of the strobe so it was in sync with the strobe from the episode. :) Everyone was sort of confused and freaked out at first, but then they started laughing and clapping. They all just thought it was great and loved that it brought the show into the room.

In March of that same school year, the theme for the house's annual toga party was "Twin Greeks: Who Killed Julius Caesar." Contrary to what most believed, I wasn't the one who came up with this theme. The Julius Caesar line came from the fact that our toga party occurred on the Ides of March. The Twin Peaks theme came from Farkas or Tourist (another house member and TP fan).

To one-up the Peaking that happened earlier that year, we got real red fabric, and Farkas and I actually created a whole brown and tan zigzag floor. It took all night...and I mean ALL night. Just taping all the scrap cardboard together to make the paint surface took hours. Man, I must have stayed up 36 hours that day...and amazingly, it's all caught on film!

While we were converting our dorm lounge into a red room, Tourist put a camcorder up in the light rafters. Every minute, the camcorder turned on and took one second worth of footage (at least that's what I recall). Below, you'll find the timelapse video of us creatign the floor and decorating the room. Note the number of people who are around helping cut out cardboard to make the floor, then how everyone disappears except Farkas and I while we work through the night and the sun comes up, and finally how more people show up right at the end. There's also a cut at one point where we went away for a few hours to let the first base coat dry.

So anyway, that's just some brief history of Twin Peaks and CSH. The Peaking became an annual event for about 4 years. This 2005 Peaking marks the return of the Peaking after a hiatus of about 2 years. It was only the first 2 or 3 Peakings where the ENTIRE run of the series was shown. It just became too hard to deal with, so we'd just watch the first season and people were left to watch my tapes of the second season at will.

Wait. What's this Twin Peaks Festival that I heard you mention?

In 2001, I was contacted by Micah, a fellow house member/TP fan who happened to be living in Seattle. He's pictured on the far left of the "Bort dough nut arranging" photo. Micah wanted to know if I wanted to go to this thing called the Twin Peaks Festival. I'd heard of it before, but just didn't have the money to invest in the trip, especially if I had to pay for a rental car and a place to stay. Because Micah lived in Seattle, I was able to lower the price of the trip, and thus was able to attend!

That's how my involvement in the Twin Peaks Festival all began. Amazingly, now I'm one of the 4 organizers of the annual fest! It takes place where they filmed the show about 40 miles outside of Seattle.

If you're at all interested, I have some photos of all my trips to Washington state for the fest, including some shots with the actors from the show who attend the fest. View festival photos in the photos section of this site.